For most of this course you'll be expected to read 2-3 papers per week
and provide a review in a particular format. You need to submit at
least one review every week, and in total you need to submit 10.
Of course you may submit more than 10, in which case your
overall grade will be based on the best of these. My suggestion is that,
each week, you first read each paper in outline, and then choose two
of those to write reviews for. On topics you are less interested (or
where the material is more challenging), write just one review.
Each review should be less than 1,000 words (and can be considerably
shorter): there is advice in-line in the review form
about what is expected for each section.

You should download the review form in either
LaTeX or MS Word
format. Make sure you put the title of the paper you are reviewing
at the appropriate place at the top, and fill out all of the sections
as instructed. You need to print out the finished reviews and submit
them, along with a cover sheet, to student admin by 4pm
on the Tuesday preceeding the class.

There will be some guidance on how to read and review a paper (for
this course) in the first lecture on 6th October. Additional
resources that you may find useful:

"How to Read a Paper", Keshav, ACM
CCR July 2007. This is a short (2 page) paper which gives some
advice on how to approach reading a research paper. For this course,
you will primarily be expected to do a first and second pass for the
majority of papers (i.e. no third pass). An exception will be when
you are giving a presentation about a paper; in this case you will
likely want to do at least some of steps in the third pass.

"Writing Reviews for Systems
Conferences", Roscoe, 2007. This is targeted more at people writing
reviews for conferences, and so has quite a lot of focus on ensuring
what you write is appropriate and useful to the authors. This is
less relevant for this course, but you may still find the advice useful
(particularly the questions in Section 4).

If you find any other documents on the web (or elsewhere) that you
find useful, please let me know by email and I'll update this page.

Each week we will generally have 3-4 presentations from
students. Presentations should be about 15-18 minutes long; we'll have
2 presentations (and discussion) to start, then have a short break,
and have the final presentation(s) and more discussion.

When giving a presentation, you need to cover at least:

What is the background and context of the paper: what motivated
the authors? What else was going on in the research community at
the time? How have things changed since? These last two questions
will obviously be more relevant for older papers.

What does the paper actually say? What's the problem they
tried to solve? What are the key ideas from the paper? What
did the authors actually do? What were the results?
Here you are trying to outline the paper in general; don't
spend too much time on the results or the evaluation: instead
focus on what the authors conclude, and how justified you
think they are.

What you think about the paper: your judgement. What's
good and what's bad? What things do you feel should have
been discussed more thoroughly? What are the key takeaways?
What is the likely impact (or what was the actual impact)?

In this course we're actually going to have three "flavours" of
presentation; Advocate, Balanced, and Critical.
These should all follow roughly the same structure described above;
however an Advocate should emphasise the good points, and perhaps
spend less time on the negatives. The Advocate is essentially playing
the role of the original author, and is trying to "sell" the work
to the audience. A Critic, on the other hand, should still present
the work fairly, but towards the end focus on the negative aspects;
essentially they should try to convince the audience that the
paper is not really much good! Finally, a balanced presentation
should emphasise both the good and bad equally.

In order to get the most out of this part of the course, it's
important that you follow the above structure, and at least
attempt to match the required flavour. Remember not to spend
too much time explaining the basics of the paper: everyone
will have read it. The key place where you can add value (and
hopefully inspire discussion!) is in your opinion
of the paper - provided you can back it up!

Some common mistakes in giving presentations:

Simply giving a repeat of the paper itself (order, reuse of text
or arguments, cut'n'paste of graphs). You can certainly borrow one
or two figures from the paper if you think they'll help you
explain or argue better, but don't just grab the whole lot.

Getting overly nervous or flustered. It is definitely a bit
nerve-wracking to stand up in front of people and talk, and
some people will find this harder than others. Remember that
this is a friendly audience behind closed doors, and
that everyone is going to go through it. Try to treat the
presentation as a discussion between you and your peers. And
know that doing these presentations in this course will
stand to you in your future research career.

Getting defensive or angry: remember, this is not your paper!
In fact, you may be arguing a case that you don't believe in.
So don't feel like you need to defend the paper against all
criticism. And if you don't understand a question (or even part of
the paper), just say so: no-one is expected to be an instant
expert on this wide variety of topics after only a few days or
weeks.

To give you a feeling for the kinds of presentations expected,
there are a few examples. These are for papers not assigned this
year, so you may find them a userful resource in any case.

We'll meet in SW01 for two hours every Thursday during Michaelmas term
(starting on Thursday 6th October). The time-slot is 2pm to 4pm,
although realistically speaking we'll aim to start at 14:05 and be
done by 15:55 (the weekly SRG/netos seminar is at 4pm on Thursdays).

The paper schedule for this year is given below. The associated
presentation schedule, which has been generated at random,
is here. Please be sure to
check that you know which papers you are presenting, what kind of
flavour of presentation you should write, and on which dates and
time slots you are.

Note: there will not be a regular class on Week 3. We are
running a Barrelfish Workshop in the lab for people interested in
and/or working on the Barrelfish research operating system. This
will be held in room FW11. The reading for Week 3 hence
consists of two recent Barrelfish papers, and there will be no
student presentations. Instead, you will be expected to attend
the workshop between 2pm and 4pm, and listen to the talks being presented.
(The workshop runs all day Thursday 20th, and the morning of Friday 21st;
and you are welcome to attend further sessions if you are interested.)

Note 2: as I will be travelling, the class on "Bugs" in Week 5
will be run by Anil Madhavapeddy.